Comments on: Reduce Your PC Memory Usage With Minimem

By: Monitor Your Computer Fans With SpeedFan | MakeUseOf.com

Monitor Your Computer Fans With SpeedFan | MakeUseOf.com — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:08:57 +0000

[...] I know that lots of people who read this blog like to have control over every aspect of their computer. That control is nice, because you can speed up your computer and make it perform the way you want it. Some articles that show this are 10 Quick Fixes to Make your Windows Computer Faster and Reduce Your PC Memory Usage With Minimem. [...]

By: Kerkia

Kerkia — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:34:18 +0000

Hi there, I thought I would let you know that a new Minimem version has just been released (http://www.kerkia.net). It contains a better optimization engine, a new user interface, new options to not optimize if lots of RAM is available, to not impact the foreground process, etc. Feedback welcome!

By: Kerkia

Kerkia — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:06:59 +0000

As the author of Minimem, I thought I would answer this interesting thread. I would like to first say that I quite agree with what is being said here, though not all of it. Especially, I would like to point out the following:
- Most applications do load in memory more than what they need, simply because optimizing software tools very well is expensive and developers go for simplicity in most cases. Therefore, moving to disk that stuff does make sense for those apps, and only those apps indeed, as they won’t reload it all.
- Most apps use more and more memory as time goes; this can be due to leaks but not necessarily; bad or lazy programming can again be a cause.
- Many applications can load their data from disk rather than memory without any impact on the user experience, and this is key driver for a tool such as Minimem typically in office and web applications.
Now to answer some comments:
- So why can’t Windows do what Minimem does? Well, Windows does not know applications so it will optimize things in the best possible way, i.e. swap when necessary, by evaluating applications needs. What Minimem does is providing YOU, the user, with the ability to decide what applications should cache data to disk rather than keep it all in memory, rather than leave that choice to the OS. Indeed, if you have no idea what app really should or could use less memory than it does, then just rely on the OS and don’t use Minimem; but if you do then Minime is the right tool to use.
- And won’t it impact performance? Maybe, if your disk is slow and the optimization frequency is high especially. Plus it depends a lot on applications. Used wisely however, it can actually improve the overall performance of your computer a lot if it is memory-limited by freeing memory not used so much by some applications for others to make a better use of it.
As an illustration, version 1.1 now automatically minimizes the memory of Minimem using the same process, and you will see that the performance impact is completely imperceivable while the RAM usage is divided by 4, which I guess is a good example. So why is this? Well, I simply wrote the app using .NET, and any .NET app starts by loading quite a bit of .NET specific stuff without knowing if it will be used or not, and it’s not in the case of Minimem for most of it.
So how does it works? Minimem reduces the working set of the selected processes, to an extent that depends on their processing time, as I tried to do something clever here rather than just emptying the whole working set; I’m not certain how more effective it is than the brute-force approach but users have reported good results so far. So really there is no rocket science and this is all available in the Windows API; of interest you may notice that a command to empty the working set does exist in the Windows toolkit that would have a similar effect.
So how is Minimem different from other regular memory optimizers? Well, simply it allows the user selecting what processes should be optimized. It won’t slow down your computer every 30s or whatever frequency you select as the action performed is very fast. If you select tons of processes to optimize then it may of course, but that may not be wise at all. By the way, I intend to further improve the algo in a future version to only optimize when required, to protect high-CPU and foreground processes, and to distribute the optimization so the perf impact is minimized as much as possible.
Also, I agree that memory optimizers that just empty the working set of active processes regularly are not doing any good and certainly not better than the OS. The point with Minimem is that users choose what programs get flushed out of memory and hence what don’t, something your OS can choose better than you because it does not know your programs as well as you do. I agree Windows will deal with the memory issue when needed, but then you will have no control over how Windows will free up memory and how much, hence what programs will be impacted and what won’t. Minimem gives you that control.
Well, at the end of the day, just try it and decide by yourself if it helps you or not. It’s free, easy to install and uninstall if you hate it, and I am quite happy to take on feedback and suggestions to improve it! I use it myself, which is the very reason why I developed it in the first place, and will be happy if it helps others. Many users have given me feedback that it helped them a lot; I wish it helps many of you. By the way, I’d like to thank you makeuseof.com for the review of the tool, which I found good and accurate. Note also I can provide a .NET 2.0 compatible standalone version for those who need it (for free of course; I have a job so I develop this for fun and for free); just ask me using the contact page on the Minimem web site!

By: Minimem: Reduce el consumo de memoria RAM » TecnoBITA.com | Blog de Informática, tecnología y mucho más

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:37:23 +0000

[...] MakeUseOf recomiendan utilizar Minimem sólo en aplicaciones que no se ejecuten seguidamente o aplicaciones [...]

By: Holon777

Holon777 — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:44:41 +0000

If you have your settings set in Minimem to purge every 30 seconds as shown in the picture, you PC will hiccup every 30 seconds, the more apps you have “optimized” the longer the stall will be, especially if you are actively using the app at the time. Windows will automatically do what the RAM optimizers do if it needs the RAM for another process, so your “leaked” mem will be paged out at some point anyway.

Very often what you are seeing is not leaks but heap fragmentation, IE and Firefox do this in a big way. Open up IE, open 3 tabs to google maps, close the tabs and you would think you have a huge leak but you don’t, Windows just doesn’t bother to recclaim the RAM because it doesn’t need to yet, it’s more efficient to let the process still have it in physical RAM, it will claim the RAM when need be, using the exact same methods as the optimizers.

By: Transcontinental

Transcontinental — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:18:17 +0000

I use a RAM optimizer which I believe works in a similar way, but applied to the RAM in its whole.
AMS Fast Defrag (http://www.amsn.ro/) is brilliant, tiny footprint, I can stay for a week opening all the tabs I wish in Firefox, I’ll always stick around the percentage of free RAM I’ve chosen (50% on my 1024 total RAM here). This little app is absolutely astonishing!

By: Blake Elias

Blake Elias — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:46:43 +0000

That’s only true when the program is actually going to come back for that data in memory. Yes, if the program actually needs all that paged data, it will be slower. But if the program has a memory leak and keeps data in memory that it never ends up using, that data paged on the hard drive will never need to be transferred back into RAM and the end result is less memory usage. You have to use it carefully, but if you use it properly with the right programs it can keep only the important data that programs call upon in memory.

By: Minimem, optimiza el uso de memoria de tus programas en Windows

Minimem, optimiza el uso de memoria de tus programas en Windows — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:16:26 +0000

[...] | MakeUseOf Tags: herramientas, memoria, optimizacion, ram Otras entradas que te pueden interesar…:BootVis, [...]

By: sparx

sparx — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:24:42 +0000

“Memory optimizing” programs never really live up to their hype. By paging the data in memory from your fast RAM onto your much slower hard-drive, you’re not really “saving” or “reducing” the memory usage. In fact, when you go to use a program that has been “optimized” (firefox for example) it’s going to be a lot slower and less responsive at first because the operating system has to transfer all of that data back to the RAM from the hard-drive before it can be used.

Some operating systems (like windows) may not be the best at managing your computers memory, but going against them and forcing data to be paged to the hard-drive when it doesn’t need to be is (in most cases) just going to make things worse.